Leading a School

Leading a School

Leading a school effectively is a skill that requires constant planning and development. A school leader can be defined as the person who is vested with formal authority over an organization or one of its sub units. He or she has status that leads to various interpersonal relations, and from this comes access to information. Information, in turn, enables the leader to devise strategies, make decisions, and implement action. Management is concerned with the optimum attainment of organizational goals and objectives with and through other people. Extension management organizations are characterized by many strategies, wide spans of control, social equality, and autonomy. Their management practices cannot be reduced to one standard set of operating guidelines that will work for all organizations continually. However, all leaders of professional organizations face the same challenge: to manage one's time, objectives, and resources in order to accomplish tasks and implement ideas.

School leaders are painfully aware of the need for revision and development of the new skill sets held by today's high performers. If change is not handled correctly, it can be more devastating then ever before. High performers reflect, discover, assess, and act. They know that a new focus on connecting the heads, hearts, and hands of people in their organization is necessary. Astute school leaders know what needs to be done but struggle with how to do it. Quite often they prefer to consider themselves as teachers or communicators rather than managers. This results in under-utilization of the increasing amount of literature on management theory and practice. The root of the problem is implementation. They must learn how to motivate others and build an efficient team. More formally defined, management is the process by which people, technology, job tasks, and other resources are combined and coordinated so as to effectively achieve organizational objectives. A process or function is a...

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